South Carolina rapper Danny Swain shoots clever satiric spitballs from the hip-hop margins. On "Shit Starters," from his debut album for Questlove's Okayplayer label, he does a mock Rick Ross flow over a Timbaland influenced groove: "I'm Seinfeld/Larry David/This beat I made sounds very dated." But eighty minutes of gripes about label persecution and insufficiently positive reviews feels like celeb whining from someone who isn’t famous.

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“Too Close”

Next was formed in Minneapolis when the uncle of Terry "T-Low" and Raphael "Tweety" Brown, who was a gospel choir director, introduced the brothers to Robert Lavelle "R.L." Huggar. Sounds of Blackness singer Ann Nesby groomed the R&B group before handing them over to Naughty by Nature's KayGee, who wrote and produced "Too Close." The idea for the song was sparked "from a conversation we had with several girls at a nightclub," explained T-Low. "It's talking about the club scene, with guys getting out of hand and the female telling him to back up, asking, 'What are you doing?'"